Social Media - What Can Location Services Do For You?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. These are all location-based services that you can leverage if you have a "venue" business - a theatre, a local shop, a shop in a national chain or any other place that people would visit.

So as a business, how can you take advantage of these services?

Let's look at how they work. The general principle is that people "check-in" to the place when they visit (although in  practice they only need to be nearby). They can then leave comments and tips, positive or negative  As a proprietor, this can be a great way of getting people "engaged" with your business, and spreading a good word.

But equally you need to watch out for any negatives. Having said that, it's not much different from any existing web forum where places are discussed - except comments are likely to be far more prominent on these location services than general forums.

When I wrote before, Facebook Places wasn't available in the UK, but it now is. Twitter has also got in on the act by allowing people to optionally tag their location to their tweets (additional to the usual 140 characters). Let's look at this first:


Twitter

Twitter is unusual in this set in that many tweets are made and read using a third party apps such as TweetDeck, which links to Twitter using an "API" interface.

Within  Twitter itself, there is the option in your account to "Add a location for your tweets". This is the "neighbourhood" you are in. The way this works is complicated, especially if you move around.

But if you are a local business it is worth switching this on, so that every tweet has your neighbourhood location tagged against it. . When someone reads a tweet for that neighbourhood, they can see a map of the neighbourhood and get the option to search all other tweets from that neighbourhood. That's when yours would appear.

The big proviso is that this new facility does not necessarily work to/from third party apps, so for the meanwhile is mainly limited to users of Twitter itself.. However if you can do it for your tweets, why not?

Facebook Places

Facebook provides a specific app to use on iPhones and other devices. A menu option is "Places", which uses the location your device is registering. This can be accurate to street and location within it.

By pressing "Check In" it provides a list of  places within about a kilometre to choose from. Or you can add a new place at the precise location you are at the time. When you check in you can add people who are with you, and then you get the option to "Like" or "Comment". However these flags do not seem to appear to people browsing from their iPhone (but probably will later).


The check-in with the comment do appear on your main Facebook wall, so your friends will see it in their news-stream.

Obviously this is useful for an individual to see when friend Joe has reached the local pub. But if you are in business how can it be used?

This Facebook page sets out how it can be set up for a business and linked to the business's page. But the comments from users suggest it isn't working properly, and there also seems to be an issue for any business with multiple locations. More importantly, it's not clear what you can do with it once you've set it up, other than provide information

Gowalla

This is actually a quick and easy way to see the various Google views (satellite etc) of where you are at that moment.

You can see "Spots" places up to about 3.5 km (2 miles), but only check into those up to about a km away. When you do you can add a comment which can optionally get posted to your Facebook and/or Twitter account.

There are "Trips" which are a collection of "Spots" that you can visit as a set, for example pubs in a town. Other than setting up a collection of your businesses into a Trip, it's not yet clear how a business might use Gowalla (can anyone tell me what they have in mind as I can't find anything quickly on their website)

Personally I find FourSquare much easier and more fun to use...

FourSquare

For some time Foursquare was "the only game in town". Literally, as it is a game - principally for towns. You collect points and badges. If you have visited somewhere more often than anyone else you become the "mayor".

The idea is that a venue can offer the "mayor" each day a free drink or some prize, and thereby encourage people to visit. However as you can check into anywhere up to about a km away, this is literally only a  game.

As the longest established location tool, most venues already exist on the system. It's easy to set up a new venue, and some people have set up their own house. That lets them be mayor - until someone who hasn't visited "ousts" them. Must be very disconcerting.to no longer be the mayor of your own home!

Foursquare is trying to compete with Facebook in  having its own "friends" . When you check into a place, you can add a comment and you can optionally tell your friends and/or Twitter, but not Facebook. You can also add "tips" e.g. "try the banoffee pie"

For your business Foursquare has a very clear webpage. There's also an increasing number of tips articles. 


In Conclusion


As an individual it's fun to use Foursquare. Gowalla does nothing for me, except the link to Google Maps. Facebook looks as if they have rushed out their location offering but it can be of some use. Adding a Twitter location can be fine, given it's only a neighbourhood.

As a business the ones to watch are FourSquare and Facebook, with Gowalla a distant third (at least in the UK). There's no harm adding a location to your Twitter tweets, which helps people find them when in the neighbourhood.

It's early days, but for businesses with shops and venues this aspect of social media can't be ignored, and could become very valuable. How are you going to leverage each of these services?

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